Samsung announces that customers who purchase one of their 250 GB 840-series SSDs between Black Friday and Cyber Monday will get a downloadable copy of Far Cry 3 as a bonus:

Samsung Electronics America, Inc., a market leader and award-winning innovator in consumer electronics, announced today that for a limited time over this Black Friday weekend, its new 250 gigabyte (GB) SSD 840 solid-state drives will be available at a special discounted price and will include a download of the new “Far Cry® 3” video game from Ubisoft Entertainment at no additional cost.

“This limited time Black Friday offer allows consumers to dramatically increase their PC’s performance at an unbeatable price” From Black Friday through Cyber Monday (11/22 – 11/26), or while supplies last, consumers will be able to purchase the 250 GB version of Samsung’s SSD 840 drive for just $169.99, $20 less than the usual minimum advertised price. They also will receive a code enabling them to download the full PC version of “Far Cry 3,” normally priced at $59.99.

Yes, you're saving money using these sites, but aren't you basically just taking that money from the publisher by bypassing the standard pricing based on region? As long as you know what you're doing...

I honestly have no problem sleeping at night. It's legit so I don't really give a shit.

I'm adding to that, though, that if I wasn't LITERALLY saving €30,- with this deal -- I mean, €30,-.. fucking hell, right?! -- I would've bought it in my home town to benefit from the instant receiving of the paid product. But instead I can literally buy two-and-a-half legitimate game copies for the European price of one. I simply will no longer put that kind of money down anymore. Not for the stuff that more often than not turns out to be either lame-ass garbage or entertainment that lasts for a maximum of 10 meager hours.

Nope, the only games that get my full €50,- these days are games like The Witcher, Deus Ex and Severance - Blade of Darkness.

Creston wrote on Nov 20, 2012, 00:04:But I guess it's possible others haven't been so fortunate. I just like the SF2's because they are SO.INSANELY.FAST.

Sandforce drives had major issues the past two years, it's been well documented on review websites and forums from a massive sampling size. OCZ stuff was especially bad since OCZ uses the low rated nand and their firmware had absurd QA issues. The speed difference in SF drives is miniscule from drives with more stable controllers and firmware, not even noticeable in real world performance unless you use RAID0 for video encoding or something.

Now that the dust has settled they might be a good purchase but as others said a lot of people aren't going to forget that easily when there are alternatives with a minor speed difference at best. The Samsung 830 or Crucial M4 are better buys IMHO, the 830 is even faster in many benchmarks.

Anyways I'm waiting for the 512GB drives to come down a bit more before I swap out

Creston wrote on Nov 19, 2012, 20:57:The triple cell drives so far have not been reliable, so I'd just stick with a Sandforce 2 SATA3 drive for now.

Sandforce 2 ssds were the buggiest this generation, they only got sorted out in the past six months. I still don't trust them, they had so many controller and firmware issues. Intel usually beats the piss of their third party controllers to catch all problems and even their Sandforce 2 drives had major problems.

- DADES - This is a signature of my name, enjoy!

I've rarely had problems with mine, other than the occasional time (once every two months or so) where my motherboard doesn't recognize it for some reason. Just powering off and back on tends to fix that.

But I guess it's possible others haven't been so fortunate. I just like the SF2's because they are SO.INSANELY.FAST.

Bricking? That's what the 3-year warranty is for... They'll iron out the bugs long before that runs out. And keep backups of your important data if you're worried about losing stuff, which you should be doing anyway. In fact, you're really not supposed to use an SSD for static storage. Having a 1TB+ standard HDD for all your music, movies, photos, and seldom-played or non-disk-intensive games is common practice.

TurdFergasun wrote on Nov 19, 2012, 18:59:besides the potential bricking issues, there is the fact that the 840's write speed is significantly slower than the 830's. read speeds are similar.

The write speed point doesn't mean much unless you have multiple SSDs and/or an absolute bleeding edge machine with ONLY USB 3.0 and SATA III devices... The 840's 240MB/sec write is still way faster than your internet downloads, gigabit network traffic, and the vast majority of transfers from USB, optical storage disks, hard disk drives, etc. The sequential read speed is usually more important, and some would argue the fact that the 840 has better random read speed and almost double random write compared to the 830 is a big advantage in everyday use (i.e. not copying large amounts of data).

And let's not forget about the pricing, here, which is the whole reason for this post. It's a great deal if you were planning on buying Far Cry 3 anyway. If I'm paying less than 50 cents a gigabyte for an SSD that has a rather small performance difference compared to one that will cost [effectively] 50% more, sheeit... Sign me up!

Creston wrote on Nov 19, 2012, 20:57:The triple cell drives so far have not been reliable, so I'd just stick with a Sandforce 2 SATA3 drive for now.

Sandforce 2 ssds were the buggiest this generation, they only got sorted out in the past six months. I still don't trust them, they had so many controller and firmware issues. Intel usually beats the piss of their third party controllers to catch all problems and even their Sandforce 2 drives had major problems.

siapnar wrote on Nov 19, 2012, 17:42:A deal like this screams 'less than stellar product'

qsto wrote on Nov 19, 2012, 13:22:jumping in blindly to a new SSD no matter how well received the manufacturer's past drives are is not very smart, unless you fully recognize the risks of being an early adopter.

I'm at a loss. What are the risks exactly?

I was thinking of gettin a 120gb SSD just to run my Windows off of.

Well, there's a pretty good risk of the drive just crapping out on you, leaving you without your data. The triple cell drives so far have not been reliable, so I'd just stick with a Sandforce 2 SATA3 drive for now.

But putting your Windows partition on an SSD will be an eye-opener for you. You won't believe how slow your old hard disk was.

qsto wrote on Nov 19, 2012, 13:22:jumping in blindly to a new SSD no matter how well received the manufacturer's past drives are is not very smart, unless you fully recognize the risks of being an early adopter.

Yes, you're saving money using these sites, but aren't you basically just taking that money from the publisher by bypassing the standard pricing based on region? As long as you know what you're doing...

Verno wrote on Nov 19, 2012, 11:14:Meh, the 840s have very questionable TLC nand. The 830 is actually the superior drive.

Yep, I just bought one of the last 256GB 830 drives I could find over the weekend to replace me second OCZ Synapse that died (don't ever buy one of those by the way). From what I've read, the 840 is actually slower and it's long-term reliability is questionable. A free Far Cry 3 would have been nice but I'll take the superior product.

Those regional key sites are a dime a dozen and often have issues with games that don't activate directly on Origin/Steam. Publishers are starting to force Steam/etc to check GeoIP for activation as a result too.

If people want to use them then fair enough but caveat emptor.

If you're basing your comment off the original Anandtech article, it's been revised giving a conservative estimate life span of 23'ish years (up from 7)

I don't read Anand personally, was just following the discussion on Ars about questionable write endurance.

Free shipping costs and games are more often than not more than 50% cheaper. New games. Yet to be released games. You name it. Only downside is that you'll have to wait a MAXimum of 2 weeks after release for a game to arrive. One week if the game has already been released when you order it.

Advertising that website only because it's saved me hundreds of EUROS already and hardly anyone knows about the place.